If you don't already know about it, you must go visit snopes.com, my FAVORITE debunker for all the knee-jerk forwarded (and alway inaccurate) e-mail diatribes I get from friends and family. Most of what people send me, snopes would characterize as glurge: they are supposed to be spiritually uplifting but are usually intellectually barren pleas to forward this to a bunch of people (how this is supposed to benefit anyone at all I have no idea). Occasionally, I'll get something that involves a get-rich-quick-scheme or a 'news' story that would be of interest to 'all Americans' (read: middle class white people who are not uncomfortable saying 'they' to refer to anyone who is not middle class and white).
I don't know why these people have yet to realize that I'm a LIBERAL and I don't agree with them—at all!
So this evening, I read something on the snopes RSS feed that really irked me. I won't go into great detail here, because you can read it for yourself. Suffice it to say, the gist of the e-mail is that illegal immigrants are getting rich by receiving all sorts of financial aid for college. Of course, I've gotten similar e-mails in the past—too many of my fellow Texans feel obliged to share these these screeds on immigration policy with me periodically. I think what compelled me to write about this particular one is that every single piece of information in the e-mail is WRONG! Occasionally in these e-mails, there's a grain of truth somewhere or a general distortion of actual facts: this one is lies from beginning to end. I can understand why some people have problems with illegal immigration: I don't agree with most of their positions on it, but I sort of understand it. But how can you live with yourself if you have to use fiction to 'prove your case'?
The title of this post refers to a political party in the early 19th century, actually called the American Party. I say they're here again but, really, don't we all believe they never really went away...?
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